For at least 50 years, Australian taxpayers and other innocents have supported a parasitic industry in academia, bureaucracy, law, media, and the tax-exempt Green Alarm "charities," all studying, regulating, inspecting, and writing about yet another "imminent threat to Queensland's Great Barrier Reef."

It has become the never-ending battle of the Coral Sea.

The threats change, but there is always a doomsday forecast – Crown-of-Thorns, oil drilling, fishing, cane-farming, coastal shipping, global warming, ocean acidity, coral-bleaching, port-dredging, chemical and fertilizer runoff, coal transport, river sediments, loss of world heritage status, etc.  Every recycled scare, magnified by the media and parroted by politicians, generates more income for the alarm industry, usually at the expense of taxpayers, consumers, or local industries.

The reality is that sea creatures would starve in pure water – all marine life needs nutrients, salts, and minerals.  These come from other life forms; from decomposing rocks and organic matter carried to the sea by rivers; from dissolving atmospheric gases; or from delta and shelf sediments stirred up by floods, cyclones, dredging, or coastal shipping.  No one supports overuse of toxic man-made chemicals, but well run cane, cattle, and coal companies can coexist with corals.

Corals have proven to be one of Earth's great survivors.  They outlasted the Carboniferous Forests, the Permian and Cretaceous extinctions, the dinosaurs, the mammoths, the Neanderthals, and the Pleistocene cycles of ice age and warming.  They thrive in warm tropical water; cluster around hot volcanic fumaroles; and survive massive petroleum spills, natural oil seeps, tidal waves and volcanic dust.  They have even recolonized the Montebello Island waters devastated by atomic bomb testing in the 1950s.

The ENSO oscillation of blobs of warm Pacific water, which caused recent coral bleaching, can be identified in historical records for at least 400 years.  Corals have survived El Niño warmings for thousands of years, and they will probably outlast Homo alarmism as Earth proceeds into the next glacial epoch.

Corals do not rely on computer models of global temperature to advise them – they read the sea level thermometer, which falls and rises as the great ice sheets come and go.

In the warming phase like the one just ending, ice melts, sea levels rise, and the reef that houses the corals may get drowned.  Corals have two choices – build their reef higher or just float south or inshore and build a new reef (like the Great Barrier Reef) in shallower, cooler water.  When islands sink beneath rising oceans, corals may build their own coral atolls as fast as the water rises.

Then when the cold era returns, ice sheets grow, sea levels fall, and the warm-era coral reefs get stranded on the new beaches and coastal plains.  Usually, the process is slow enough to allow the coral polyps to float into deeper, warmer water closer to the equator and build another reef.

This eminently sensible policy of "move when you have to" has proved a successful survival policy for the corals for 500 million years.

Humans should copy the corals – "forget the computer climate models but watch real data like actual sea levels and ... move when you have to."

Further Reading:

How Coral Atolls form:
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/kits/corals/media/supp_coral04a.html
https://www.livescience.com/31975-how-coral-atolls-form.html

Corals Thrive in warm acid waters:
http://www.c3headlines.com/2017/10/study-debunks-97-percent-consensus-corals-prosper-global-warming-acidification.html
https://principia-scientific.org/the-end-of-the-ocean-acidification-scare-for-corals/

Corals that Survived the peaks of Holocene warming will survive a bit of El Nino bleaching:
http://joannenova.com.au/2017/09/scientists-surprised-that-reef-that-survived-the-hotter-holocene-is-already-recovering-from-2016-bleaching/

Coral Reefs drowned in the rapid sea level rise as the great ice sheets melted:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/09/28/catastrophic-sea-level-rise-in-the-past-may-have-drowned-corals-in-hawaii/

Corals thrive in warm tropical waters and can adapt to periodic warming:
http://www.2gb.com/podcast/peter-ridd/

Corals and Atom bombs:
http://surfdivenfish.com.au/other-adventures/montebello-islands-safaris/
https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=montebello_islands+corals&qpvt=montebello_islands+corals&FORM=IGRE

Corals, hot tropical waters and Volcanoes:
http://oceans.taraexpeditions.org/en/jdb/kimbe-bay-the-land-of-coral-and-volcanoes/

Oceans cope with Oil Spills:
https://carbon-sense.com/2010/08/23/oil-spills/